Again, her fingers brushed against his. And this time she noticed the slash of colour across his cheekbones. So did he feel this same wobbly sensation in the pit of his stomach? If so, what were they going to do about it?
‘I’ll just give Truffle a drink.’ He took water and a bowl from his backpack.
Ryan McGregor was a man who truly took care of his own.
So unlike Charlie, who’d seemed so caring when they’d first got together but had turned out to be totally careless with her heart.
The more Georgie looked back on her marriage, the more she wondered how she’d missed all the clues. All the little things—like never making her a mug of coffee when he’d made one for himself—that she’d told herself to ignore because they just meant her husband had a tough day in the Emergency Department: maybe they hadn’t been that at all. She’d let herself be blinded by his charm and hadn’t seen the self-centred man behind it all. The man who’d lied to her, and who’d lied to his mistress. The man who’d let her down time after time, and she’d made excuses for him because she’d so wanted their marriage to work.
How could she trust her judgement any more?
‘Are you OK?’ Ryan asked, looking up at her when he’d put the empty bowl back in his backpack.
‘Uh-huh,’ she said.
‘Sometimes you just need the sound of the sea to clear your head,’ Ryan said, and she wondered what had made him feel that he needed his head cleared. His ex, maybe? Did he miss her?
She realised she’d spoked aloud when Ryan said, ‘I miss bits of Zoe. I miss the good times.’ His eyes were unreadable. ‘Do you miss Charlie?’
She had a choice: to keep living the lie she’d told in London, or to tell the truth and clear a way for herself to move forward, to finally get over her past. ‘I miss him,’ she said. Ryan’s expression was still absolutely inscrutable. ‘But, like you, I miss bits. The good bits.’
Which sounded as if there had been bad bits, too, Ryan thought. ‘Sometime the bad stuff gets in the way and you don’t mean to hurt each other,’ he said.
‘I don’t think Charlie meant to hurt me. He just didn’t consider me,’ she said, looking bleak. ‘I look back and I wonder if I fooled myself right from the start and saw the man I wanted him to be, not the man he really was. And I wanted my marriage to work, so I ignored things I maybe should’ve made a stand about.’
It sounded as if she’d been really struggling; as well as losing her husband she was facing up to the fact that her marriage hadn’t been what she’d hoped it would be. And all the while people had been pitying the grieving widow. That was enough to mess with anyone’s head.
‘Sometimes you need space to think about what you really want,’ he said. ‘And the sea’s good for that. I used to walk here when I was thinking about how things were with me and Zoe. Before I got Truffle.’ When he’d seen the children playing on the beach, seen the families, and wondered what was so wrong with him that he couldn’t give Zoe what she wanted.
‘I’m hoping that distance will stop all the pity,’ she said.
Which told him she didn’t want him to pity her, either. If he offered her a hug, would she see it as pity? Or would she return that hug, hold him close?
And, if she held him close, what then? Where would it go? There was a lot more to her past than met the eye, and he didn’t want to trample on a sore spot—or let her down, the way he’d let Zoe down.
So, even though he had an idea that she too felt that crazy spark whenever they accidentally touched, he didn’t know how to deal with it.
‘Sometimes you have to learn to leave the past behind,’ he said. ‘Try and get past the regrets and the might-have-beens. And then you can make the most of tomorrow.’
‘When you’ve made mistakes, it’s hard to trust yourself again,’ she said, sounding so vulnerable that he wanted to wrap his arms around her and keep her safe.
But he hadn’t kept Zoe’s heart safe, so how could he be sure that he’d keep Georgie’s safe? What she’d just said... ‘You’re so right,’ he agreed. ‘I think all you can do is give it time.’
‘I’ve already given it time. It’s been more than a year, for me,’ she said.
‘Me, too.’
They were almost strangers, Maybe they’d be good for each other; maybe they wouldn’t. But right here, right now, he wasn’t risking it. ‘Let’s go and grab a coffee,’ he said. ‘There’s a dog-friendly café up the road.’ Somewhere with people close by so they wouldn’t be so intimate.
The café was right on the edge of the beach, with a slate roof, dormer windows and a turret. Inside, it was all scrubbed wood tables, teamed with bentwood chairs; on the walls were fairy lights and framed old photographs.
‘Cappuccino with no chocolate on top, right?’ he asked.
Georgie was impressed that he’d noticed what she drank in the canteen at work. ‘Thank you.’
The coffee turned out to be excellent. He held up his mug, saying, ‘Slàinte mhath.’
‘Slanj-a-va?’ she repeated.
He smiled. ‘It’s Gaelic for “Good health”—and that was a pretty good first attempt at pronouncing it. Anyway, to friendship.’
It was kind of a warning that he wasn’t prepared to offer anything more. But she wasn’t ready to risk her heart again, so she’d take that. ‘To friendship,’ she said.
The next morning, Ryan made a fuss of Truffle, promising to take her out later, before driving Georgie the hour to Doune Castle.
It had been a while since he’d last visited, but the building was spectacular: a fourteenth-century courtyard castle with a gatehouse that towered a hundred feet up, made of reddish-brown stone with white quoins.
‘That’s stunning,’
